A. L. Buehrer What I Write and Why

Monday, December 5, 2016

This
year was my first attempting National Novel Writing Month’s great 50k words in
30 days challenge. I’ve been hanging around on the sidelines wondering if I
have what it takes for several years now, and abruptly—here in the middle of my
senior year of college—I decided it was my time.

And I did it. I actually surpassed 52k on
November 30th, claiming my official win plus. My odds actually
hadn’t been that great. If I was like a lot of participants, attempting their
first novel, I doubt that I could have done it. But even if I hadn’t been able
to pull it off, I think it would have been well worth the try, because doing
something that extreme teaches you things.

So, without further ado, here’s what I
learned on the front lines of NaNoWriMo.

1.I learned how to save images I edited in Photoshop so that
the internet would acknowledge their existence. Big revelation. I figured
out how to do this when saving my cover image for my NaNo novel. You “save for
the web.” Never would have thought of that. Ha. I’m so techno-savvy.But I’m glad I got this figured out, so now I
can edit title images for this blog, and stick them on Pinterest and stuff.
Better late than never.

2.Better
late than never.
That’s something else I learned. I was 10k words behind up until Thanksgiving
break. I kept seeing people on the forums freaking out over being 2k behind, or
so. I gritted my teeth and caught up suddenly in the home stretch. It was
totally possible!

3.Along the same lines, I
discovered the hidden true moral of “The
Tortoise and the Hare.” We were supposed to win NaNo by way of the
tortoise’s strategy. Just one foot in front of the other, 1,667 words a day.
But if you look at my chart of daily word count throughout the month, you see
that’s not what I did at all. There were about ten days where I hit and
exceeded the target word-count. I worked in hare-like sprints. Guys, the only
reason the hare lost the race was because he fell asleep. Therefore, the true
moral of the story was: no sleeping.

4.Stopwatches
are better than timers.
This is a crazy fact that I discovered, and it may quite possibly be only true
for me. When I set a thirty-minute timer, I was lucky to get 500 words down in
that time. I thought that was my limit. Then I set a stopwatch. When I hit 500
words, I stopped it--always between 15 and 12 minutes. Crazy.

5.All dialogue should be argumentative underneath. This keeps it from
getting boring and loosing connection with the plot. If there’s always some
sort of conflict of interests underneath the conversation, it becomes a lot
more logical, and easier to know what the character should say next. Even if
the conflict is very small and petty, it’s going to help.

6.Collapsing
bridges and crashing helicopters are good things. I think this is
self-explanatory. I mean, everybody knows this, right?

7.And lastly, writing is not supposed to be as serious as we try to make it all
the time. I wrote this novel to prove that to myself once and for all. We
novelists spend so much time agonizing over unattainable perfection. I’m done
trying to take myself so seriously. We have one of the most fun occupations in
the world. It’s time to cut loose and enjoy it.

One
more thing before I go. Here is the cover of my NaNo project. It’s never going
to be published. I mean, it’s written from the perspective of my childhood
imaginary enemy. I’m in it as a character and mentioned by name, and portrayed
in a rather negative light, I must say. I needed to write a piece of literature
with absolutely no pressure hanging over it, so that’s what I did.

But now, back to reality. I’ve got to try to
attain perfection with the draft of a dystopian novel I’ve got scheduled for
release in February 2017.